Redemption

I’ve wanted to write something about George Herbert’s seventeenth-century poem ‘Redemption’ for a while, as I’ve come back to it over and over again and find it especially meaningful at my current stage in life. I live in an expensive city, and when the lease on my house expired earlier this year I couldn’t afford a new place to live. I’ve spent the last few months in a state of intense, crippling anxiety, and still have no solution. Perhaps a close reread of this poem will give me a new perspective.

‘Redemption’, as its title suggests, is an examination of the Christian belief that Jesus died in order to release humanity from the burden of sin. The word itself is from the Latin redimere, to buy back – Jesus’s self-sacrifice paid all humanity’s debt, freeing us all to love God and each other in a way that’s purely giving, rather than transactional. It’s a beautiful idea, and I think it can be appreciated whether or not you’re religious. Imagine how it might be if we all collectively agreed that we could share our lives and resources and selves with others without keeping score, without strategising, without insisting on complex networks of assurance and accountability. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in, neither spiritually nor economically. But let’s keep it in mind as a thought experiment, at least.

Herbert’s poem dramatises Christian redemption by speaking as a tenant trying to renegotiate his lease with a ‘rich lord’. The first quatrain presents the problem in straightforward terms – it’s not until the second, when the speaker mentions searching for said lord in heaven, that we realise we’re not in the real world of a dwindling bank balance and several browser tabs open, displaying grim studio apartments on Rightmove for more money than we can afford. This is going to be a Metaphor, so buckle up.

I don’t know who the ‘they’ of line 6 are, but I like to picture a seraphic executive assistant rolling two or three of its wing-shielded eyes and sending the speaker back to earth. The speaker has gleaned from the angelic EA that his lord has possibly overpaid for his latest acquisition, and has gone to take control of it. As a tenant in financial difficulties, our intrepid speaker knows what these real estate moguls are like, so he searches in the most prestigious places for the one person who can relieve his burden. But it doesn’t pan out as expected.

Here’s the poem in full:

I’ve loved this poem since I first read it, perhaps twenty years ago now. It always felt powerful to me. There’s a lot of tension in those grammatical structures, a lot of potential energy locked in the legalistic language; it’s so terse and tightly-structured, its careful monosyllables hanging tidily on the sonnet form. The arc of the story is ideally suited to a Shakespearean sonnet, a three-part structure in the quatrains with a stunning surprise ending in the concluding couplet.

I’m interested in why I loved it so much back then. Perhaps it was a relief to discover that so-called ‘metaphysical poetry’ didn’t have to alienate women readers in the way Donne’s always did, for me. As a sixth-former I was encouraged to emulate the critically-established reverence for Donne’s ‘love’ poetry without allowing any space for the revulsion I felt for his aggressive and possessive sexuality. And I did adore those poems, I was so moved by them – I will never not have

… nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere

inscribed in my memory, as it is a magnificent image. And yet Donne concludes that poem with a misogynistic quip that deflates the whole piece. I’m poetically opposed to that, as well as ideologically, though it does give me some ideas for how a queer woman’s perspective may offer a superior conclusion to the question of love’s embodiment, and a more satisfactory resolution of that imagery.

But back to Herbert – who in ‘Redemption’ manages, as I said, a superb use of this particular sonnet form. The Shakespearean sonnet is structured as three ABAB quatrains and a couplet at the end, and before encountering ‘Redemption’ I’d always found it to be a rather smug and officious form. I don’t necessarily still hold this view, but looking at Shakespeare’s concluding couplets reminds me of why ‘Redemption’ is so special to me. Here are three of the most famous:

If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I suppose always found there to be something a bit glib about them, lovely as they often are – they feel like a poetic QED, a neatly-rhyming conclusion to satisfy the preceding setup and draw it to a tidy close. Not so with Herbert’s. The last quatrain of ‘Redemption’ ends without punctuation and it’s as if the couplet urgently cuts in, disrupting the established pattern, speeding up, giving no time for the negotiation the speaker has been planning. Under Christ’s new order it just doesn’t work that way any more. The answer’s yes. It’s always yes. But there’s no time to ask why, because his time is short. In the granting comes death. The couplet enacts this as the poem hurtles to its close and leaves us with the speaker in stunned silence. And it’s in that quiet that we have to rethink all our previous assumptions and let our poor little anxious busy human minds catch up.

I love this kind of thing. I love it when it feels like a poetic form is being invented in real time. Whiplash! – reading ‘Redemption’ makes me feel, every time, like I’m being lulled into the expectation of a fourth quatrain, so measured is the writing. In the aftermath of the couplet the rhythm of ten silenced iambs seems to beat out in my mind. I wonder what I have been doing with my days to drown out this precious energetic profound silence.

My city’s a funny one. Its property market is wildly distorted by the existence of ancient colleges, hungry monstrous entities feeding on the transient efforts of humans and outliving them all. And yet I built a life here, somehow, in the gaps between those entities. Do I think there’s some wealthy landlord in a sketchy pub on the east side of town just waiting to grant me a sweet deal on a one bedroom in the city centre? Of course not, but perhaps there’s something else to learn from Herbert.

‘Redemption’ is deadly serious, but it’s also genuinely funny. The speaker is upholding the old order through his assumptions, casually wandering from earth to heaven and back again without any of the awe and wonder such movement ought to generate. He’s so consumed by the details of his tenancy agreement that he hasn’t even imagined that his world has changed, that all he has to do is ask. I think, actually, that my love of this poem comes from the deep compassion and affection I find myself feeling for the speaker. How remarkable – a humour that guides a reader to love, not judgement or disdain! Herbert allows the reader to feel, perhaps, a hint of the love his God expresses towards humanity. He shows us how we might look to a loving Creator, how serious we are in our assumptions, how clueless, how desperate, how endearing; how in need of saving.

So perhaps this poem can lead me to question what old orders I might be carrying around, what heavy assumptions might be hampering my freedom and generating an anxiety that feels unbearable at times. Perhaps it can help me to shine that light of compassion and affection onto myself.